Civil Protection Areas proposal → VOTING PHASE

After 3+ weeks of silence following the RFC discussion (no further comments/objections), the proposal is now officially in Voting Phase!

📋 Wiki: osm.wiki/Proposal:Civil_Protection_Areas

🗳️ Vote until: March 23, 2026

🖼️ Live demo: https://andreadp271.github.io/civil_protection_areas_osm/

Key improvements from RFC feedback:

• Comparison tables vs assembly_point/disaster_help_point

• Clear shelter area distinctions (outdoor vs indoor)

• Refined rescue staging/logistics definitions

Please cast your {{vote

yes}}, {{vote

no}} or {{vote

abstain}} on the Wiki!

Rail trails with route relations with railway=abandoned to denote a rail trail is not working. When the named “bike route” enters city streets or along side walks where the railroad never went this becomes and tagging nightmare.

I have had to remove railway=abandoned from a route relation in British Columbia and in New Hampshire where these were both issues. osm.org/note/5066887#map=15/41.40203/-73.62096

osm.org/note/4680502#map=15/49.49511/-121.22581

Can we find a better tags to mark bike routes with rail trail?
this is specific to route relations and not current tags for infrastructure, railway=abandoned still works for infrastructure

I would propose something like railway=trail so we keep this straight. It looks like railtrail=yes is a tag.

Yours in Mapping Natfoot

this is related to my other project on routing and bike routes. ask if you want to know more.

This is not about the Linux Foundations Overture Maps attempt to hoodwink the Open Geospatial Consortium into standardising Overtures GERS (Global Entity Reference System) ¹. There is so little technical content available in that proposal that it is difficult to write even a short paragraph about it. But it is motivated by Overtures attempt to engage in the great American tradition of selling snake oil by suggesting that GERS solves real problems ². None of the following is new, and all this has been discussed many times in the OSM community.

It isn’t as if having a persistent id for an entity isn’t useful, for example if you are running a restaurant review site³ you definitely want a way to reference and track the state of the object you have reviews for in your geodata source, be it be based on OSM or some other data. The issue is simply:

your persistent id is not my persistent id.

Or perhaps better, your persistence is not my persistence. Lets illustrate that with the restaurant review example again: assume you’ve generated an id in some fashion and map that to an OSM object (more on that below), when do you consider the current restaurant different from the original, and when do you consider it different enough that you will want a new id?

Is it

• when the name changes?
• when the location changes? What about if it has just moved to the next block?
• when the cuisine changes?
• when the chef changes?
• when the owner changes?

And so on.

The answers to these questions depend on your use case and your business logic and a global one size fits all is very unlikely to be of any help at all. Now you might say, but there are objects, places, buildings and geographical entities that have less tendency to change, at least on a typical humans time scale and yes ids could be useful for these, but they are by their very nature easily referenced by their location⁴.

… See full entry

Today I received an invitation to attend the bi-monthly OSM US Maintainers Working Group.

But due to timezone difficulties, I don’t think I’ll be able to attend it live.

The meeting agenda has been shared, mainly focusing on the topic of standards and interoperability. There are some interesting starter questions there, so I’m intrigued to answer those questions in an OSM diary instead, hoping that I’ll be able to join the discussion asynchronously.

So, here we go :

---

“What standards (geospatial file or data formats, metadata schemas, wire protocols, structured text formats, encodings, etc.) does your project depend on or interact with?”

I frequently use GeoJSON format in several of my projects.

“Are there any standards that you wish would be evolved/extended but aren’t actively maintained? Or implementations that aren’t fully compliant that you wish would be?”

GeoJSON fits pretty much all of my required use cases. My only concern right now is how to make GeoJSON files more compact. I haven’t researched much about this since there’s currently no urgent performance issue that needs to be handled, but I love tweaking my apps for performance.

“Are there standard formats or protocols that you would like to use, but aren’t well supported in your language/ecosystem?”

The General Transit Feed Specification.

I’ve been interested in this data format for a long time, but I still don’t know how to properly tinker with it. Last time I worked on this, I had to make my own Python implementation to read and navigate GTFS files. I don’t know what the current situation is right now. Maybe it’s already supported, maybe not.

“What are your thoughts on Overture’s OGC proposal?”

I already posted my thoughts in a certain Slack thread somewhere. Here’s the verbatim quote:

“Does an OGC standard become legally binding worldwide or something?

… See full entry

Finished adding villages in Nagqu City with Tibetan names listed in the Place Names Database KNAB and having a Q-id in wikidata; I’m continuing with Ngari Prefecture.

Place names in Tibetan script are viewable using maps.wikimedia.org with lang parameter set to bo.

Tonight I finished mapping Maud, meaning the bulk of Fairview California is mapped. There are still some places along Fairview Avenue as it goes around in a circle and becomes Hayward but this is area shared by Hayward, Castro Valley and Fairview.

It feels so good to see my home there and recognizable.

I started this project in earnest on November 18th (although I did my own street back in June).

Proposal for Tagging Detector‑Operated Pedestrian Signals in OSM

Author: Derlamaer
Date: 18 February 2026

Introduction

I’m new to OSM and to cartography in general, so please excuse any imperfections in this post. As I’ve been mapping my surroundings, I noticed a gap in how we describe certain modern pedestrian crossings, and I would like to propose a way to fill it.

More and more signal‑controlled pedestrian crossings are equipped with automatic presence detectors. These sensors detect a pedestrian (or sometimes a vehicle) and trigger the traffic signal phase without requiring a push button. This behaviour is common in newer installations, but OSM’s tagging does not yet have a clear, standard way to capture it.

This diary entry describes the situation, proposes a tag, and invites feedback.

Current OSM Tagging for Signalised Crossings

Today, a typical signalised pedestrian crossing in OSM is tagged as:

highway=crossing
crossing=traffic_signals

To refine this, the OSM Wiki documents a couple of useful additional keys:

button_operated=yes/no Indicates whether a pedestrian must press a button to request the green signal.

traffic_signals:sound=yes/no Indicates the presence of an acoustic signal for visually impaired users. (See the wiki page for crossing=traffic_signals for details .)

However, there is no widely documented, standard key that says:

“This traffic signal is triggered automatically by a detector, with no need for a push‑button.”

That is the missing piece I am trying to address.

Real‑World Example (Toulouse, France)

One concrete example can be found in Toulouse, France, where several pedestrian crossings use overhead or roadside sensors (camera, infrared, radar or similar) to detect pedestrians as they approach the kerb.

A representative location is shown on Google Street View (link as used in the forum post). In such setups:

… See full entry

From the Build Plan developed with Claude

Project Purpose A web application enabling mappers and data quality analysts to select a geographic area, fetch Overture Maps POI data and OpenStreetMap data in parallel, algorithmically compare them, and produce two outputs: a reviewed, selective upload to OSM via OAuth2, and an annotated GeoJSON export classifying each Overture POI by assessment category.

No edits to OSM happen without manual review. Overture is more of an attention guide (at least that’s my hypothesis)

Here’s the chat

Lots of UX fine tuning to come. Quick observations:

• Overture is very noisy, lots that is irrelevant (business mailing addresses in personal houses, mislocated POIs, closed places, duplications with differences across Meta/Microsoft/4SQ sources)
• Matching is hard but can be improved
• There is useful signal in Overture, places that need addition to OSM in new developments, but you have to have means to easily sort through and keep a record.

… See full entry

In May 2025 the OSM website introduced two new optional fields in user profiles: company and location. I recently analyzed whether these fields could be useful for detecting organized (paid) editing accounts for my How Did You Contribute (HDYC) pages. Short summary:

• Around 66k active user profiles analyzed
• About 1,000 unique company entries
• About 2,200 location values

Interestingly, large companies such as Apple, Amazon, or Meta still mostly appear in the profile description, not in the dedicated company field. I wrote a more detailed blog post here.

While working on this analysis I also added username history to HDYC, derived from the full changeset replication history. I am not fully happy with the current presentation and would appreciate feedback:

1. Move the username section further down?
2. Add a time-based filter (e.g. last 5–10 years)?
3. Remove it.

Until recently, I mainly used the opening_hours evaluation tool to quickly generate valid OSM opening hours. However, it often requires some manual work to simplify the syntax afterwards.

That’s why I tried using ChatGPT instead - and it works surprisingly well. You can simply copy and paste opening hours from websites, or even upload an image, and ask it to format them for the opening_hours tag.

Example

LLM query

please format the opening hours in the attached image for the OSM 'opening_hours' tag.

Output

Mo 13:00-18:00; Tu-Th 09:30-18:00; Fr 09:30-21:00; Sa 09:00-17:00; Su off

This is a rather simple example, but it also works well with more complex opening hours.

Taking info from

https://www.rigacci.org/wiki/doku.php/doc/appunti/hardware/gps_logger_i_blue_747

and

https://www.technologyblog.de/2019/05/gps-rollover-zerstoert-gps-logger/

and

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Holux_M-241

a modified mtkbabel can set the time when reading from the device. That should probably go into some check whether it’s really a M-241 that is connected, but as long as the battery lasts the device shows the correct time again and logs tracks in this year and not dated 2006..

$ diff -u /usr/bin/mtkbabel ./mtkbabel
--- /usr/bin/mtkbabel   2019-10-12 12:23:29.000000000 +0200
+++ ./mtkbabel  2026-03-03 19:37:37.482923895 +0100
@@ -166,7 +166,7 @@
 #-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 my $debug    = $LOG_WARNING;     # Default loggin level.
 my $port     = '/dev/ttyUSB0';   # Default communication port.
-my $baudrate = 115200;           # Default port speed.
+my $baudrate = 38400;           # Default port speed.
 my $ro_weeks = 0;                # Weeks offset to fix Weeks Rollover Bug

 # GPX global values.
@@ -356,6 +356,18 @@
     set_data_types($model_id);
 }

+# Set time to work around week rollover bug
+
+my ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year) = gmtime;
+
+$year += 1900;      # year is years since 1900
+$mon  += 1;         # month is 0-11
+
+packet_send(sprintf('PMTK335,%04d,%02d,%02d,%02d,%02d,%02d', $year, $mon, $mday, $hour, $min, $sec));
+$ret = packet_wait('PMTK001');
+printf "Set time string: $year, $mon, $mday, $hour, $min, $sec\n";
+printf "Return for setting time: $ret\n";
+
 #-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 # Erase memory.
 #------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

I have created a tag, diet:excipient_free=* , which is about finding clean supplements, i.e., without harmful ingredients that can make us infertile, inflamed, obese or even epileptic.

For example, whenever we look for magnesium (bis)glycinate, we want one thing, but many so-called “magnesium” supplements come with a lot more ingredients that might reduce the price, or enhance the appearance, but of course, at a cost; to hurt and make us need another supplement to compensate with the side effects. (Maybe they should rename those “magnesium” supplements to corn syrup supplements instead.)

Almost if not all of those ingredients fall into one category, excipients. Let’s use diet:excipient_free=* on pharmacies and nutrition supplement stores to promote a healthier future without dyes, fillers, flavorants, preservatives and other inactive ingredients that can cost us our health.

OpenStreetMap old timers know about the infamous 2009 TIGER import of road data in the US that continues giving to this day. Our story has none of the, maybe deliberate, shenanigans (see the TIGER improvement project) that went on back then in the US, but there are clearly some similarities in the lessons that should be learnt.

Back in July of 2011 the Swiss community undertook a big effort to import municipality boundaries from swisstopo (the marketing name of the federal Swiss GIS department) (see osm.wiki/Switzerland/swissBOUNDARIES3D). Being an OSM n00b at the time with just a bit over a year editing experience I didn’t really do anything useful for the import proper, but I did organise the explicit permission needed from swisstopo as this was many years before their data would become available for use on open terms for us in September 2021. With a couple of technical hiccups along the way that are not really documented, we finally managed to complete the work by early August.

Fast forward to today: I’ve been going on for a few years now that we really need a quality assurance process so that we can discover and track differences between swisstopos data and what is in OSM. We knew and fully expected that there would be differences, because:

• at the time of the import we simplified the boundaries quite significantly because of the resource constraints of the computer hardware available to us,
• over the last 14 years we independently followed the mergers and other changes of the municipalities (see osm.wiki/Switzerland/2026_Municipality_Mergers), and didn’t expect this to improve the accuracy of the boundaries, and we knew that now and then there would be associated minor geometry changes that we wouldn’t be able to track,
• and then just general decay due to glueing and accidental modifications.

Thanks to work by our community member habi inspired by earlier work by Branko Kokanović from Serbia, we have now have daily QA data and boy, we were wrong.

… See full entry

3 March 2026: Writing this at a Missing Maps “London” remote meeting, realizing that I’d never written a OSM diary about the research I did within the ecosystem. I’m so late! But I’d love to still write this down. This placeholder is cross-linked with my blog.

From October 2020 to June 2021, I conducted ethnographic research within the (humanitarian) OpenStreetMap universe, trying to understand how communities, crises, and corporations came together on OSM. My thesis was ultimately about how humanitarian technologies like open source maps are used and created in response to crisis, and the convoluted mix of humanitarian values, corporate interests, and international networks that intersect on the OpenStreetMap platform.

The project and community is incredibly complex, a confluence of humanitarian actors, technology workers, and crowdsourced labor. My initial questions focused on why people contribute to open-source platforms like OSM (and Wikipedia for that matter), but they later evolved into what role humanitarian mapping plays within the wider ecosystem of geospatial and mapping technologies it is a part of.

Increasingly, as this was just before the wave of new AI technologies, I found that OSM data was being used in order to train AI systems like those used for road detection, etc.

While the written work is in the process of publication (eventually!), there are a number of public videos that share some of my public-facing findings on the subject.

Crisis Maps, Community, and Corporations (an Anthropologist’s perspective)

This talk shares my initial findings from this period, drawing from interviews and studies of political economy, science and technology studies, and humanitarianism. Social science methods might help us to better understand this changing period of OSM and HOT history, as it heads into the future.

Mapping crises, communities and capitalism on OpenStreetMap: situating humanitarian mapping in the (open source) mapping supply chain

… See full entry

I started a new wiki talk page discussion on the conflicting/controversial usage of the wetland=tidalflat tag regarding implied and explicit surface types:

• Change of definition to mainly encompass mud and discourage use on sand flats

Also posted a comment on positive related changes being worked on by the carto team:

• openstreetmap-carto PR: #5067 Use dedicated style for landcover polygons over water

Hoy comienzo la plenitud de mi sinceridad

Every map tells a story. Some stories are drawn with roads and buildings. Others are written through people, voices, and lived experiences. This is the story of how mapping became a bridge between climate vulnerability and community resilience in the heart of Dhaka. Under the Climate Resilience Fellowship, proudly supported by OpenMappingHub Asia Pacific, our Team 8 embarked on a journey called “Healthy Homes, Safer Futures.” Our goal was simple yet powerful: to strengthen climate awareness and resilience among vulnerable communities living in Dhaka’s urban informal settlements.

Where It All Began

In early May, all ten fellowship teams gathered in Dhaka, sharing ideas and aspirations for climate action. We were two coordinators: Mohammad Azharul Islam — Oceanographer and GIS Analyst at the Center for Geoservice and Research Ahsan Habib Saimon — Capacity Building Officer at Christian Commission for Development in Bangladesh Together, they envisioned a project that would connect data, digital tools, and grassroots knowledge to create safer living environments.

… See full entry

Nimman Road, Chiang Mai(Thailand) is a well-mapped, high-traffic corridor. It scores a B on network density: good intersection frequency, reasonable block lengths. But it scores near zero on crossing coverage because there are no highway=crossing nodes tagged within the 800m analysis radius. The street has physical crossings. They’re just invisible to any tool that relies on OSM, which is most tools.

That’s what SafeStreets shows: not just a score, but which data gap is causing it.

What SafeStreets is?

A free tool that scores the walkability and pedestrian safety of any street address globally(graded out of 10). No account required, 190+ countries. OSM is the backbone, and the only data source that works everywhere.

How OSM powers it, three functions?

… See full entry

Portal North Bridge construction and study documents

https://archive.org/details/@isstatenisland/lists/7/portal-bridge-documents?sort=date

I gathered and uploaded documents relating to the Portal Bridge capacity enhancement project and its replacement, Portal North Bridge. The documents (except the Amtrak bulletins) come from NJDEP’s DocMiner. The Amtrak bulletins were retrieved by FOIA request. It appears the FEIS disappeared off the web many years ago.

The original plans intended to build a 3-track fixed span to the north. The documents from 2019 and later depict the currently chosen plan, the two-track fixed structure to the north. The south structure is not funded.

https://archive.org/details/portal-bridge-project-feis-final-4f-october-2008 Portal Bridge Capacity Enhancement Project - Final Environmental Impact Statement and Final Section 4(f) Evaluation, October 2008

https://archive.org/details/portal-bridge-project-feis-final-4f-appendix-vol1-october-2008 Portal Bridge Capacity Enhancement Project - Final Environmental Impact Statement and Final Section 4(f) Evaluation, October 2008: Appendix Volume 1

https://archive.org/details/portal-bridge-project-feis-final-4f-appendix-vol2-october-2008 Portal Bridge Capacity Enhancement Project - Final Environmental Impact Statement and Final Section 4(f) Evaluation, October 2008: Appendix Volume 2

https://archive.org/details/portal-bridge-project-relocation-study-january-2010 Portal Bridge Capacity Enhancement Project - Relocation Feasibility Study, January 2010

https://archive.org/details/portal-bridge-project-gc02-construction-plan-sheets-2019 Portal Bridge Capacity Enhancement GC.02 Contract - Construction Plan Sheets, August 15th 2019

https://archive.org/details/portal-bridge-project-environmental-impact-sheets-2020-2025 Portal Bridge Capacity Enhancement Project - Environmental Impact Sheets, January 2020 with November 2025 modifications

… See full entry

OK. Last year I wrote a short guide on mapping Indian addresses but I lost it in my tiny pursuit to delete myself. Today I suddenly came across the fact that the guide was actually used by mappers and, hence, as a result I am now writing this post to become a replacement for that old guide. Since this is a new one, I don’t want to just rehash the old stuff and instead this time I am going to take a simple problem and show how I would solve it from scratch.

A1, Tower 2, Sector 11, RK Puram, South West District, Delhi, India

A problem very similar to this one came up in OSM India’s XMPP channel today. So, how does one go about mapping this address?

As it’s usually the case we can ignore the district, state, and country part as they are all very well mapped in India. This leaves us with everything upto RK Puram.

If you are thinking that something as big as RK Puram should surely be already on the map then you are wrong; In my “career” I have actually seen larger areas without any nodes for them. So we will in fact check if it’s already on the map and, guess what, it actually is already mapped as a suburb, so that’s one less step for us! I should mention that in OSM there are three “neighbourhood” levels below the district: quarter, suburb, and neighbourhood in decreasing order of size. In most cases suburb and neighbourhood should be enough for you, but it is important to be aware of quarter for special situations.

Now let’s check for Sector 11. As of writing this, Sector 11 isn’t on the map. So I will put a neighbourhood node at the approximate centre of Sector 11. (Remember that neighbourhood is smaller than suburb.) We are making good progress.

… See full entry